Exporting Thunderbird Mails: How to transfer your data

With Thunderbird, exporting your mails is quite straightforward. You have several ways to do this, the easiest is probably to export your entire profile folder.

How to export your Thunderbird mails and profile

To export your Thunderbird mails and move them to a new PC, for example, it is best to save your profile folder.

1. To export your Thunderbird mails, first navigate to the location of your profile folder. The quickest way to find this is to go to the "Help" menu. Navigate further via "Troubleshooting Information" and click on "Open Folder" there.
2. Mark the folder "Thunderbird" and copy it to an external data carrier or to a cloud. For this step, Thunderbird must be closed.
3. This way, your entire profile and all data associated with it will be copied.

Backing up only emails

If you only want to export your emails, access your emails and select the ones you want to export. Press [CTRL]+[A] to select all of them. Then click on the menu and further on "Save as". Now save the emails in the desired location as EML files.

Thunderbird: How to create a backup

Exporting the emails or the profile folder is also a way to manually create a backup of your data. Somewhat more conveniently, this also works with external tools such as MozBackup. Here you can specify which data you want to create a backup of. These are collected in the destination folder or in the destination cloud in a folder.